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Over a decade, 787 migrant workers were sent back to their home countries over a decade, nearly all against their will, a study finds.

The study's lead author, Dr. Aaron Orkin, is a researcher with University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health and emergency physician at Humber River Regional Hospital. (SUPPLIED PHOTO)

Ned Peart, a migrant farm worker from Jamaica, was killed in a workplace accident in 2002. His family's human rights complaints led to the release of privately held data on the "medical repatriation" of migrant farm workers. (TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO)

Supporters of Ned Peart have lost the fight for mandatory inquests into the deaths of migrant farm workers in Ontario. But the Jamaican man, crushed to death in a Brantford tobacco kiln, did not die in vain.

As a result of a human rights complaint made on Peart’s behalf, Canadian researchers for the first time obtained privately collected data, hidden from the public eye, on the illnesses and injuries that have led to migrant workers being abruptly fired and sent home — a practice euphemistically known as “medical repatriation.”

Their http://www.cmajopen.ca/content/2/3/E192.full findings,END published in the latest edition of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, offer a rare glimpse into the nature and extent of the injuries and health problems involved in these terminations.

“Without any public records or information, there can be no oversight to ensure that sick and injured workers are treated fairly,” said Dr. Aaron Orkin, an emergency physician at Humber River Regional Hospital and lead author of the study.

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Peart was in his second year in Canada’s seasonal agricultural workers’ program in 2002, when he was killed at a Brantford farm. His family claimed the Coroner’s Act violated the Ontario Human Rights Code by denying Peart’s survivors the right to an inquest.

Although the complaint was eventually dismissed, FARMS (Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services), a private entity that manages the program, was ordered to submit its medical repatriation database as evidence — information that was not previously accessible to researchers.

The study found that, between 2001 and 2011, 787 migrant farm workers were terminated and sent back to their country of origin for medical reasons.

More than 41 per cent of those workers were sent back because of medical or surgical conditions, including cancer, neurological conditions, back problems and gastrointestinal problems such as stomach pain, hernias and appendicitis.

While one-quarter of these workers were fired because of injuries such as tobacco poisoning or broken limbs, three female workers lost their jobs after they became pregnant.

Only 1 in 50 of the injured or sick workers left at their own will.

“The repatriation of migrant farm workers for health-related reasons and medical termination of their employment represents a unique form of deportation from Canada,” said the report.

“Although farm workers are entitled to receive health care before the termination of their employment and repatriation, in practice, workers are sometimes repatriated immediately, without receiving such care.”

Among the workers repatriated, those from Barbados had the highest return rate (9.6 per 1,000), followed by their counterparts from Trinidad-Tobago (5.69), eastern Caribbean (5.07), Jamaica (4.42) and Mexico (4.38).

“I don’t blame the local farmers, who hire migrant workers. They are under a lot of pressure to produce food in the cheapest way,” said Orkin. “I blame the higher-up policymakers, who put workers in these situations.”

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